Press release

Epic Games Goes All-In on AWS

Creator of Fortnite, the multiplayer battle royale game that has become a global phenomenon, relies on AWS for its expansive infrastructure, unmatched reliability, and global scale

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul. 17, 2018-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that video game and software development corporation Epic Games, creator of the blockbuster cross-platform game Fortnite,is continuing to invest in AWS as its choice in infrastructure—going all-in on the world’s leading cloud—to build new games and enhance the in-game experiences for its more than a hundred million online players around the globe. Since its inception, Fortnite has been powered by AWS, leveraging AWS’s unmatched performance and scalability to support the millions of concurrent players that engage each day. The leading game developer runs its worldwide game server fleet, backend platform systems, databases, and websites on AWS, and will leverage the breadth and depth of AWS’s services, including analytics, machine learning, and containers, to continually improve gameplay.

AWS’s fault-tolerant, highly performant infrastructure enables Epic Games to reliably support more than 125 million players worldwide who flock to Fortnite to win a Victory Royale. By using AWS, Epic Games is able to scale up to meet the demands of these players and expand its services globally with minimal effort. For example, Epic Games recently ran an event on AWS where the company invited all Fortnite players to join the game and watch a one-time global event that lasted for only several minutes. The event generated a rush of players into the game that was unprecedented for Epic Games, and the capacity that AWS provided enabled the company to run that event without any serious problems, ensuring game servers were available to all who wanted to participate. In addition, Epic Games is using AWS analytics services such as Amazon Kinesis Streams and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) to ingest and analyze the billions of events generated by the game and social media interaction so that the company can assess design decisions, identify player sentiment, and adjust key elements of the game. Epic Games will also be able to simplify the management of its infrastructure during peak times using Amazon Elastic Container Services for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), and is looking to leverage the Amazon ML Solutions Lab to incorporate machine learning into its games.

“We’ve been developing our services on AWS since 2012. AWS has the broadest and deepest portfolio of services that allow us to stay focused on driving innovation in our products rather than the basic infrastructure needed to get or keep a service running. Their unmatched scalability has been instrumental in keeping pace with our rocketing player populations,” said Chris Dyl, Director of Platform at Epic Games. “We decided to go all-in using AWS because they enable us to offer a quality gaming experience to millions of gamers around the world, simultaneously. We are excited to work with AWS to expand our use of analytics, machine learning, and containerized applications using Kubernetes to make our sizable infrastructure even easier to maintain.”

“Fortnite’s meteoric rise is a quintessential example of how embracing the cloud and utilizing it fully can significantly impact the trajectory of your business,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “Throughout Fortnite’s phenomenal growth trajectory, Epic Games has relied upon AWS to provide gamers with the best gaming experience in the world, and to speed innovation by delivering new items, features, and play modes to the game on a regular basis. Together, we look forward to driving new player experiences, leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning services.”

About Amazon Web Services

For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 55 Availability Zones (AZs) within 18 geographic regions and one Local Region around the world, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Epic Games

Founded in 1991, Epic Games is the creator of Fortnite, Unreal, Gears of War, Shadow Complex, and the Infinity Blade series of games. Epic’s Unreal Engine technology brings high-fidelity, interactive experiences to PC, console, mobile, AR, VR and the Web. Unreal Engine is freely available at unrealengine.com. For the very latest on the studio, check out @EpicGames.